Overview

This collection of essays compares and discusses women's participation and experiences in credit markets in early modern Europe, and highlights the characteristics, common mechanisms, similarities, discrepancies, and differences across various regions in Europe in different time periods, and at all levels of society. The essays focus on the role of women as creditors and debtors (a topic largely ignored in traditional historiography), but also and above all on the development of their roles across time. Were women able to enter the credit market, and if so, how and in what proportion? What was then the meaning of their involvement in this market? What did their involvement mean for the community and for their household? Was credit a vector of female emancipation and empowerment? What were the changes that occurred for them in the transition to capitalism? These essays offer a variety of perspectives on women's roles in the credit markets of early modern Europe in order to outline and answer these questions as well as analysing and exploring the nature of women, money, credit, and debt in a pre-industrial Europe.

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9782503570525

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"""Women and Credit in Pre-Industrial Europe examines the roles of women, the frequency of their participation and the specific credit instruments they chose in the pre-industrial credit market, from 1400 and 1800 across western Europe. The recent historiographical trend to investigate women's operation in and significance to developing medieval and early modern credit markets has offered historians a fruitful new approach to assess the roles of women in the premodern economy, as well as structures of actual practice and everyday life. This volume, edited by Elise M. Dermineur, makes a ground-breaking contribution to this historiography by focusing on empirical data based on largely careful studies of notarial and judicial records. Many of the articles specify the number of female creditors and debtors, with associated demographic factors such as marital status, and the financial tools they used, as well as highlighting qualitative case evidence and the significance of their credit activities. The focus on this valuable and elusive empirical data should make this volume particularly significant for economic historians, as it offers numerical evidence to support the significance of gender analysis to those interested in economic history."" --Shennan Hutton, University of California, Davis"

Women and Credit in Pre-Industrial Europe examines the roles of women, the frequency of their participation and the specific credit instruments they chose in the pre-industrial credit market, from 1400 and 1800 across western Europe. The recent historiographical trend to investigate women's operation in and significance to developing medieval and early modern credit markets has offered historians a fruitful new approach to assess the roles of women in the premodern economy, as well as structures of actual practice and everyday life. This volume, edited by Elise M. Dermineur, makes a ground-breaking contribution to this historiography by focusing on empirical data based on largely careful studies of notarial and judicial records. Many of the articles specify the number of female creditors and debtors, with associated demographic factors such as marital status, and the financial tools they used, as well as highlighting qualitative case evidence and the significance of their credit activities. The focus on this valuable and elusive empirical data should make this volume particularly significant for economic historians, as it offers numerical evidence to support the significance of gender analysis to those interested in economic history. --Shennan Hutton, University of California, Davis

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